


Rosemary for the Soul

by paperiuni



Series: Unwritten: Codas & Interludes [9]
Category: Shadowhunters (TV)
Genre: Basically An Excuse For Messy & Soddenly Romantic Porn, Domestic, Emotional Intimacy, Episode: s03e12 Original Sin, Late Night Conversations, Light Angst, M/M, Stories From Magnus's History, Storytelling, Unnecessarily Long Lead-Ups to Smut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-11
Updated: 2019-03-11
Packaged: 2019-11-15 18:50:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,700
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18078974
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperiuni/pseuds/paperiuni
Summary: Alec bakes bread. Magnus tells a story. Through some detours, a night in leads them closer together. (Set after 3.12.)





	Rosemary for the Soul

**Author's Note:**

> Look, I don't know. This story cornered me for a week until I wrestled it down, so here it is now.
> 
> Mindy and Rei both read parts of this when I was trying to tame it into a complete draft, and helped me find the story this needed to be. ♥ A thousand thanks!
> 
> This is a spiritual sequel to [_Book of Days_](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17990894), but you don't have to read that fic to get this one.
> 
> I'm on tumblr @[poemsfromthealley](https://poemsfromthealley.tumblr.com/) and twitter @[juneofthepen](https://twitter.com/juneofthepen). If you want to live tweet, you can use #junefic as a hashtag. Or come say hi and scream about Shadowhunters with me!
> 
>  **Content Notes** : There's a brief reference to sexual violence that occurred in the past, in the context of a demon impregnating a woman with a warlock child. It's not graphic, but it's there. Also: liberties were taken with historical detail in Magnus's story. All inaccuracies are my fault alone.

 

The front door sounds just as Alec is staring, with semi-religious fervor, at the final stages of his baking experiment in the oven.

The key turning in the lock still startles him. Magnus used to have a charm on the door that'd unlock it at a flair of his hand. It dissipated the other day, though Magnus hasn't been able to spark it awake in almost three weeks. Magnus shuffles about in the hallway, but Alec ignores him, this once, to dive for the bread before the caprices of the oven char it.

The crust gives a satisfyingly hollow note when he raps it. The kitchen bears the marks of his efforts, flour in faint drifts all over the worktop, the spice rack scattered by his furious search for the basil.

"Alexander?" Magnus steps into the kitchen, unwrapping his scarf, the color high on his cheeks. He's walked home from Catarina's. "I thought I smelled—are you _baking_?"

"Yeah." Alec shifts in front of the loaf in its pan, as if the dense fragrance of fresh bread didn't betray him utterly anyway. With his luck, he has oregano in his hair.

Magnus's gaze wanders to the sheaf of loose pages where Alec found the recipe. They were tucked at the end of the kitchen shelf, peeking from between the spines of cookbooks by a dozen culinary masterminds Magnus has probably socialized with. They're written by hand, the paper soft with age.

"They were on the shelf, so I didn't think they were off-limits." Disquiet slides up his spine.

"I keep the arcane formulas elsewhere." Magnus pats Alec's arm as he goes past. "I'd forgotten these were here." He sounds a bit hazy, which might just mean he's had a drink or three with Cat, but he leaves through the papers with such precise care that Alec doubts it.

"I hit a dead end with this lead I was following for Izzy," Alec says. "And I thought of how, when you can't solve a problem, you go do something totally different. This—"

"You're stress-baking." Magnus chuckles. "That's admittedly a little bizarre, and a lot charming."

"Hey now. You can't stop making fun of how I run straight at things, so at least I'm exploring alternatives angles."

That shouldn't describe the current state of affairs between them as aptly as it does.

On the surface things are surprisingly fine. Clary is safe, retrieved and recovering. Everyone is regaining their footings after her return. Day to day, Alec can focus on the routine operations of the Institute, as opposed to ending some world-quaking threat that _happened_ to emerge in his jurisdiction. Magnus has gone back to doing consultations of every kind he can offer without actual spellcasting. The pace of their lives is falling into a steady rhythm, jarred only by the weight in Magnus's effortless step, by the darkness that comes into his eyes.

 _Memento mori_. Every Shadowhunter knows they'll die. Every warlock knows they won't.

On that note, Alec probably has no idea what normal life with Magnus is like.

"So you're distraction-baking," Magnus says. "I am flattered you're taking up my methods." His mouth is cool and wind-chapped on Alec's cheek, flushed in turn from the heat of the kitchen. Alec tilts into the kiss without shame. "Did I smell rosemary?"

"There was some left over from the weekend. That's why I picked that recipe."

Humming, Magnus begins folding his scarf up idly, into tidy sections of indigo wool. His eyes glaze again with some distant but profound emotion.

"Is something wrong?" Despite all the copious, careful space Alec is giving Magnus at present, surely he can ask that.

"Oh, not at all." Magnus snaps back to the moment, to survey the ingredients strewn about. "Since you've gone to the trouble, there's really only one way to eat this bread. Where's the olive oil?"

"The nice kind? Cupboard."

Alec steps back to let Magnus bustle, swallowing the ready protest that they don't even know if the bread is any _good_. It smells right, rich with herbs and yeast and sea salt, but claiming victory too early is what loses you the whole battle. He starts putting the kitchen to rights while Magnus scrounges up a shallow china bowl, probably also by some fancy designer Alec's never heard of, two thankfully ordinary wine glasses, and a bottle from the high shelf of the cabinet.

Alec knows that he prefers baking to cooking by now. Once he learned to factor in the more outlandish quirks of the oven, anyway. There's something grounding to making things like this, trying the crust of a fresh loaf and knowing he put that together. It's a different sort of contentment from solving a dispute between his soldiers or clearing out a demon nest. Smaller, but warm and tangible all the same.

A metaphor lurks somewhere in that, too.

"Baker first." Magnus interrupts him with a soft crunch of crust and a piece of steaming bread dipped in olive oil, and Alec opens his mouth for the morsel with a stifled gasp.

The fact that the bread is kind of perfect sails past him. Magnus's fingertips skim against his lip like a lick of fire, too quick to hurt, too slow not to wake his nerves.

So Alec swallows, once more than necessary, and mumbles, "Yeah, it's fine. It's good."

"I had no doubt." Magnus breaks off another piece, and no, Alec is not watching him eat that when his skin still hums with that brush of contact. He wipes a crumb from his jaw with undue industry, like he could scrub away the unthinking tenderness of Magnus's fingers.

For the last two weeks, Magnus has been a whirlwind of motion and activity. He went back to seeing clients as soon as he could, with barely a deep breath in between. Alec's gentle efforts to slow him down are received but change little.

"Oh, you and your eternal humility," Magnus says then, a blissful note in his voice that is _not helping_. "'Good' is rather an understatement here."

"I just followed the recipe."

"It does come from a very reliable source."

Alec manages to make his sigh about seventy percent fond. "I know you love a good lead-up, but what's the big mystery?"

"Come along and I might tell you." Magnus scoops the bread from the pan and into a clean kitchen towel. It registers to Alec only now that he's torn chunks from the loaf with his fingers.

"The kitchen's a bit of a mess."

"Life is a mess, darling." Magnus makes an extravagant flourish. "I'd rather sit on the floor and drink old _recioto_ and eat this bread before it goes cold."

Next time, Alec swears solemnly to himself, he's just googling up a no-strings-attached recipe. Then he shakes any potential flour from his clothes and follows Magnus.

Magnus never quite admitted it, but the pair of plump, oversized floor cushions probably appeared in the living room on Alec's account. He tends to sprawl when comfortable, and Magnus must have taken one look too many at him on the floor, propped at an odd angle to the couch rather than _on_ it.

Whatever else, the cushions are also good for a slightly unsettling living room picnic. Alec folds himself onto one and accepts a glass of wine from Magnus. It's the color of crushed raspberries and gives off a dense but likely sophisticated whiff of oak barrel.

"Is this really a bread wine? Is that a thing?"

The lighter clicks as Magnus touches the flame to the candles scattered on the coffee table. They were left over from the night when Magnus filled the loft with candles, lighting each by hand, a mourning rite now undone. Then he seats himself again, smoothly, crossing his ankles.

"It is now." The insouciant air sloughing from him, Magnus traces his finger along the rim of his glass, producing a soft chime. "Would you care to hear a story?"

"You mean like a memory."

"Yes." Magnus closes his eyes. "About someone I loved once."

Sometimes, when the universe is kind, you know a fork in the road as you come to it. This is such a change from Magnus's recent self-preservative verve that Alec still almost skids past the moment.

Their last discussion of Magnus's past ended in a quarrel. Their conversations on the future spin out to indefinite ends, toppling like a runaway car tire finally robbed of momentum.

Alec pulls free another piece of bread. "Okay."

"Such resounding enthusiasm." Magnus's eyes sparkle darkly. "She wasn't a lover, though we lived under the same roof for a time."

Maybe Alec was too prickly in his agreement. "You've been building up to this since you got in. Be a waste of good mood lighting to stop now."

Whether it should or not, the bread goes amazingly with the thick sweet notes of the wine. Quietly Alec checks tonight off as a culinary success.

"I was somewhere in my first century. I'd parted ways with my father, and I wanted to get away, so I traveled west. That way I could go over land." Magnus makes an odd breathy noise. "Ships terrified me."

The chuckle slips free before Alec can trap it. "Really? I mean, I hate cramped spaces. I get it."

"That was just it." Magnus throws back an indecent portion of his wine in one steady swallow. "I could always slip away from a merchant caravan. On a ship, there was nowhere to run. And I couldn't stay in the land of my birth. What was left for me there? So, the west it was."

Unceremoniously Alec reaches over to fill Magnus's glass. He doesn't know what's chipped the dam that holds back Magnus's surfeit of history, but something has, so Alec had best count his blessings.

"Some years later I found myself in Spain," Magnus goes on. "I met her near València, the only daughter of an ailing father. The family vineyard was prosperous, but she was unmarried. Her mother had been a Berber. It set her apart."

Magnus definitely has a storytelling voice, lower and more melodious than his smooth speaking cadence.

"Was she part of the Shadow World?" Listening to Magnus banter about the past is usually half entertaining, half annoying, but this doesn't seem to be some famous person or historical figure that Magnus got into improbable yet humorous escapades with.

Well, a chance of humorous escapades still exists.

"In the unhappiest of ways," Magnus says, and there goes that chance.

Sitting forward to underline his attention, though it's rapt already, Alec nods for Magnus to continue.

"She—Luisa—had a maid, Inés, though calling her a servant does her a grave disservice. They stewarded the winery together while Luisa's father got worse and worse. He wanted her to marry, of course. A household without a man to head it was an invitation to every sort of unsavory character."

"Right. That's like the one slight redeeming quality Shadowhunters have always had. Property rights for women. Hooray."

"Indeed." Magnus raises his glass with flair. "However, before you ask, here's how I come into the story. I was hunting down a shapeshifter demon—a task that looks quite doable when you're under a hundred and strapped for funds after cavorting away the last of your previous commission. So, I'd tracked it to the village near the vineyard."

Alec finds his own tension easing as Magnus sketches out a picture of lush rows of grapevines, an old farm nestled in a bend in a river, and the shrewd young woman who came to meet him when he went to the winery.

"Ostensibly, to see her father. I tended to tell people I was a traveling physician, forced onto the road by a family scandal in some suitably faraway city."

"I'm weirdly glad to know you've _never_ been able to resist a dramatic made-up backstory."

Magnus almost spills the olive oil by twisting out to poke Alec's leg with his foot. "Hush, you ingrate. The details mattered. It was a good cover for curing people's ills, when I could. Sadly not in this case. He must have had late-stage cancer, which is still too complex for warlock healing, even now. But Luisa and I got to talking—it was a hot day, and I wanted to wait until evening to walk back to the village."

"You remember that? From, what, three hundred years back?"

"I remember the sense of the moment. Not her face, only that she had dark hair, burned red by the sun here and there. Not her voice, though some of the things we talked about. Only the dry heat, and the feeling how sometimes you know, right away after meeting a person, that they're a good place to linger. That there's something there."

The next sentence shivers shapeless in the air. Alec makes a beckoning gesture.

"I recall that feeling well right now," Magnus says. "I had it with you."

The problem with Magnus is that he comes at everything sideways: academic conundrums and emotions alike. Alec should be better at remembering that. His breath jostles out of him, an involuntary lash of reaction.

He doesn't know if that makes him wistfully sad or staggeringly happy.

He takes another nibble of the bread, getting olive oil on his fingers. "Okay. Go on with the story?"

It's a goddamn stupid answer, but it's about as fair as Magnus cracking Alec open with those five words like he just did. Magnus's casual proximity, a hand's reach away, pulls at Alec like a guttering gust at a wind vane.

"All right," Magnus concedes. "The next bit, I'm afraid, is the unhappy part. More wine?"

Alec holds out his glass. There's probably a point to why they're drinking Italian wine with this Spanish story, but he's already juggling all the implication he can handle.

"When I was about to leave, Luisa told me her maid had also taken ill that week. She told it like a secret, like she'd spent the afternoon weighing whether to tell me. So I knew there was more to it." Magnus stills, one graceful hand around the glass, a candle flame glimmering tawny on its rim. "Last month, Inés had been attacked on the road and come home bruised and bleeding, with no memory of what had happened.

"It would've been a common tale of woe, in that time and place. They were two women alone with only a handful of vineyard workers, and Luisa was half a Moor. The violence she feared had been done to Inés mattered less than the fear that Inés was pregnant."

Alec puts a hand on Magnus's raised knee, kneading small circles with his fingertips. His throat still feels choked, and it might be ridiculous to offer comfort for something that happened so long ago. He doesn't know what else to do.

"I went to see her. And found more than I'd bargained for." Magnus sips at the wine. It looks more like collecting himself than a dramatic pause. "The essence of the demon I was tracking was all over her. She was carrying a warlock child."

To rue the way most warlocks are conceived—through rape, trickery or deceit—would not help, so Alec doesn't open his mouth. He pushes down the slow shock and echoed sorrow that simmer in him, and shifts so he's leaning on the same propped-up pillow as Magnus, their shoulders nudged together. _I'm here. I'm listening._

"I'd been free from my father for decades. I was a little down on my luck, but I'd been making a name for myself. So I sat with that valiant young woman who'd be destroyed by her child one way or another, and all I could think about was my mother."

Their hands meet in the space between them, their fingers slotting together. Magnus goes on, "Neither of them knew a thing about the Shadow World. They feared God and prayed to the saints, as you did. I watched them cry together, and..."

"You stayed," Alec says. "You helped them."

"One could argue they helped me just as much." Magnus shrugs, pensive, his gaze lost across the room, swathed in darkness beyond the circle of the candles. "I almost walked away. Who was I in that house, in that country? A stranger and an outsider. But Luisa came to me, and I'd told her something about how I was a long way from home, too, and she said to me—" Magnus's voice rises into the richer note of Spanish "—'there's a way to grow something good in the soil of our misfortune'."

"That's pretty bold, if she'd known you for all of one day."

"Oh yes. Doubly so for a woman in her circumstances." Magnus shakes his head minutely. "But she'd seen me at work, looked at me, and decided something. I was a man suitable for her plans. The woman she loved was with child. A child that, unknown to either of them, would be born with magic in its veins."

Straining to imagine Magnus in this hazy, picturesque setting, blurred by the mists of history, Alec thinks about the day they met. How Magnus cut deeper into his secrets after a few hours of acquaintance than people he'd known all his life had done in all that time. About drinks in this same living room a few days later, and a thorny talk about trust the next morning.

Maybe once in a lifetime, you know.

"I hunted the demon. I finished my commission." Magnus fiddles with a chunk of bread. Alec stopped eating about at the time Magnus started talking. "Then I went back to the vineyard. Luisa's father had died while I'd been gone. So I told her that she could have a year. I'd stay, and we'd fabricate a marriage between us, and Luisa could claim Inés's baby as her own."

Alec falls back into the rustling cushion, forcing Magnus to sit up straight so as not to be pulled down with him. "A _lot_ happened in that last sentence."

"It was a sound plan," Magnus says. "She did, of course, offer me a reward, which was a credible reason for me to accept."

"I guess you had a plan for getting out of that fake marriage?" Merriment sparks in Alec, but Magnus's smile cants wryly, too.

"Luisa couldn't hold the vineyard as an unmarried woman. As a respectable widow, she would have a solid claim to it. It wouldn't have been the first time I'd faked my death."

"Just, casually."

"It was very easy for people to die or disappear those days. Census records weren't foolproof, if they existed at all. Distances were long, and few people traveled far. It even took me another hundred-odd years to put the portal spell together."

"You're fucking ridiculous, you know that?" Alec tells Magnus, his voice rasping with sudden, ardent regard. "So you got married, except not really, lived in some dreamy vineyard valley with a pair of lesbians and helped raise their magical kid, and then, uh, died in a tragic grape-stomping accident?"

"You skipped over a few plot twists, but points for the grape-treading. Hard work, that." Magnus breaks the piece of bread in two and offers half of it to Alec. "This is Inés's bread. Well, her recipe. She'd bring it out to the veranda, and we'd eat it like this, with olive oil and unwatered wine, when the work was done."

The city night with its dragging clouds and shifting lights is a very different backdrop from a long-ago winery yard. Right here, looking up at Magnus alone, his skin copper and gold under the candles, his eyes dark with memory, Alec sees in him the same quiet solace that sneaks along his own mind.

"There's more to the story," Magnus says. "But that's the short of it. I stayed for a few years, until little Sílvia came into her magic, and then she and I kept her secret together for a few more."

"Some other night," Alec says, and Magnus nods, once, solid and sure. It's enough. It's more than enough.

Alec can't hope to peel apart all the layers of what Magnus has just laid bare before him. It sounds like a fable, the painterly softness of Magnus's description, the people who remain a little ghostly in spite of the care Magnus puts to their names each time.

Warlocks have long memories. Alec knows it as a fact, but he's only starting to understand. These women, dead for three hundred years, are still as clear to Magnus as relatives Alec used to know as a child. Their faces have faded but their memory persists in minute details, the sound of a sentence, the familiar smell of a favorite food.

How must Magnus have felt, folding secrets over secrets, setting up whatever smoke and mirrors to obscure that half this strange little family were immortals? It was more than a year, but clearly there was an end. Like he'd slipped into that life, he also slipped out of it.

Alec lifts his glass, and Magnus clinks his own against it. They drink a silent toast of remembrance.

There's a thousand things Alec wants to say. _Thank you_ or _It sounds like you loved them a lot_ or _I'm glad you had that._ He is. It hurts, but more for Magnus than for himself now.

He doesn't quite dare touch Magnus. Magnus is still, like he hasn't been since he came back, and somehow, closer than he's been to Alec ever since. It's like Alec could touch something more than his hand or face or shoulder, his very thoughts, the dreams swimming in filmy currents under his conscious mind.

They go through their days, they sleep and wake up together, kiss hello and goodbye, share meals and banter and debate and make love, but there's been a wired energy to all of it, an avid need to keep moving. To stop is to doubt, Alec was taught. In a fight, stillness gets you killed.

The rule most probably does not apply here. Stillness makes space for all the things left to lie.

So, like an idiot, Alec steps back before he tramples them.

He rises, slow so as not to jar the moment, the air that's too tender to breathe.

Magnus looks up, and Alec makes a hapless gesture toward the kitchen. "I'm gonna put the rest of that away. You look like you might want a minute."

Magnus smiles then, but there's something yearning in his eyes. "Maybe. It's past both our bedtime, anyway."

Alec does not want to hear about his morning shift, which he well knows is looming. "Yeah."

He picks up the loaf and the wine bottle and the dishes, tucks them all in their places in the kitchen, and cleans as much of the rest as he can with midnight knocking. He drifts through his evening routine a step behind Magnus, who's silently cleared out to the bedroom in the meantime.

Maybe Alec takes too much time brushing his teeth. Maybe he changes his mind about the clothes he lays out, which never happens, except tonight. The bed rustles as Magnus lies down on it, a book in his hand that he's not even pretending to read. The sound is too loud in Alec's ears.

This is the most soothing space he knows. The distance between them—one born from care and doubt, rather than a physical one—keeps breaking like eggshell, a fragment at a time.

Switching off the lamp, so only Magnus's reading light illuminates the room, Alec inhales for a count of three, exhales the same. Every nerve in his skin prickles with something that's not quite desire, though Magnus is still its focal point.

Alec tumbles onto his back into the fine, fresh sheets with such an impact that the bed, proven steady under much more vigorous stresses, creaks audibly. Puttering about, he could sort of ignore the near-magnetic tug of Magnus's presence. Now he's supposed to go to _sleep_ here.

Next to him, Magnus reaches to put his book away, untouched. _Do you feel this, too?_

Alec turns his head. "Magnus?"

The slope of the pillow blurs the eyeline. His searching hand meets Magnus's cheek and fits itself to it with blind familiarity. Magnus sighs, soft and airy, a little wistful, before clasping Alec's wrist and rolling to face him.

"I'm here, Alexander."

It's the sound of his own name that breaks Alec. Grasping at Magnus, at his bare arm and warm skin, he feels Magnus echo the movement, his face in shadow, and then Magnus is above him, strong hands on his neck, thumbs tender under his jaw. The answer to the question he didn't voice comes with Magnus's mouth on his. Alec yields and bends into him, wild with his own wanting.

They kiss like drowning, a willing, delirious fall into one another. Too heady to even try more than to hold Magnus there, lips to lips, breath to breath, Alec drags a palm down Magnus's back. Magnus climbs on top of him, knees to the bed, nearly clumsy in his haste.

When Alec circles over onto his stomach, Magnus groans, barely caught in his teeth. The muscles of his abdomen ripple with tension.

This Alec knows. Even when he and Magnus don't know how talk, their bodies do, in the dialects of untroubled desire. The mood is too fragile, too close, like one word might shatter it, but he wouldn't even know how not to want Magnus. Lust curves his hips up, and Magnus shifts into the motion, the long slow slide robbing them both of breath.

With a bit of wrangling, they manage to lose Magnus's pajama pants and most of Alec's tee-shirt. Then the fabric torques itself under his neck and arm, and he has to push Magnus off so he can sit up. Magnus peels the shirt off with adroit fingers that drag against Alec's clavicle and across his nipple, raising it into a hard, tingling peak, echoing down his body to his cock.

He presses his moan into Magnus's cheek, trembling. _God_. Usually it takes a _little_ more to get him this worked up, though Alec's never felt the need to play down how readily Magnus affects him.

It's more than Magnus's skin on his this time. It's the strange vein of _knowing_ that tonight opened.

Heedless of Alec's snarled thoughts, Magnus slides to the floor, urging Alec to rise enough to tug and coax his pants off. Alec gulps in a breath at the cool air on his skin, flushed and pricked with sweat. His hands ache to reach for Magnus, to twine into Magnus until the brittle, longing part of him knits whole.

Magnus seems to have other ideas.

Without bluff or pretense, he tucks himself between Alec's knees where Alec is sitting on the brink of the bed. His hand drifts along the inside of Alec's thigh, and Alec's cock dips into his seeking grip, tight and ready.

Magnus cants his temple against Alec's sternum, the back of his neck a smooth, exposed line. He doesn't really like Alec's hands on his head when he's sucking Alec off, so it might not be leave to touch him.

Alec's heart twists. This is fine and familiar and he knows he could sink into Magnus like Magnus seems to want, for a stunning, straightforward chase to completion.

So Alec just misread that first consuming kiss. Imagined the speechless moment on the floor, when he thought that some barrier had crumbled.

"May I?" Magnus's hand is still on his cock. Alec almost laughs. Here he is, wandering through some dark wood of emotional exposure, and Magnus just wants a late-night blowjob.

He lets the laugh wrest itself from his mouth, but it ends up sounding sad.

"Magnus," he says, because Magnus is the beacon, the star on the horizon that he looks to when he's lost. Except this time Magnus, too, has been thrown loose from the foundations that braced him, and they're both spinning without a fixed point. "Look at me."

His hand set low on Alec's thigh instead, Magnus does.

Alec knows then that he wasn't wrong. The whole spool of story and reflection, the little increments of intimacy—they're not only real to him. They lie submerged under the wary whimsy in Magnus's eyes.

Alec scoots back, tugging Magnus forward. He can't say this with Magnus on his knees before him, so it's a mercy when Magnus comes to him. Some hesitation slows his movement, easy and limber as it is.

"I want you," Alec says, "but not like this. Not right now. Not if you shut me out again."

Magnus lets out a breath, sitting back onto his heels, still astride Alec's legs. Alec watches his throat flex, and that, too, looks curiously vulnerable.

"If you don't want me to suck your cock, you may say it, Alexander. There are other options."

Alec kind of wants to shake him. "God, you know that's not it. I mean the thing where you're—rushing through, this whole distraction bit. You did it when we were sparring, too. You keep doing it."

Magnus's mouth compresses into a sharp stroke. His expression tries to arrange itself into neutrality, not very successfully. Alec has to tell himself not to look away.

"If that's what works for you now, I'm good with it," he says. "Just not tonight."

He'll have to tear himself from this feeling, the fathomless depth of it, by a measure of force. He isn't sure that either of them can relax into sleep next to the other.

Though Magnus holds himself taut, his face shifts from the indignation and into something softer. His hands, fingers restless, curl onto Alec's biceps. "I did notice. How the mood changed between us earlier. It took me by surprise."

"That could've been worse, I guess." Alec lowers his chin. Half of him is humming with Magnus's nearness; the other half feels hollow and wistful, like the moment when you know you have to let a cherished thing go. What did he even gain that feels so rough to lose?

Magnus's hand against his neck startles him. Magnus slides it up with purposeful care, until he can, gently, gently, bring Alec's head up.

The angle of his kiss is just as studied, and Alec's body reacts before his mind can, stirring to the heat of Magnus's mouth. Magnus's thumb under his jaw keeps him where Magnus wants him, but Magnus kisses him like a question, like an offering. Alec leans up into it, pressing his open hands to Magnus's back.

Slowly Magnus bends down until his face is level with Alec's. "I'm here. I will try to be here."

"I think," Alec begins. His capacity to ask for things like Magnus's mouth on him or Magnus's cock in him or being allowed to bend Magnus over the dinner table and tie his hands—that was a _day_ —is just fine. It's mostly limited by his own imagination. This is a much harder thing to ask. "I need you to stay with me. I don't know how deep this goes, but either we find out together, or I step off and—go sleep in the guest room or something."

How does he frame what he feels? How is it different from the steadfast love he has for Magnus all the same?

"That's wonderfully cryptic," Magnus opines, though his voice is hushed.

"But you feel it, too."

Magnus strokes his thumb along Alec's throat, from the side of his Adam's apple to the line of his blocking rune. "I feel it, too."

Alec kisses him.

Magnus slants into it with his whole body, close and heady, until they topple into the bed, and Alec has to kick himself backward in a flailing try not to tumble off the edge. The kiss thwarted, Magnus buries his head into Alec's neck and snorts a laugh, a tremor of nerves in his amusement.

Tangling together in the middle of the bed, safely away from the edges, they kiss until Alec's mouth smarts with it. Still, he pulls Magnus back in when Magnus dares to duck away gasping. Magnus rolls his hips, his cock dragging delightfully against Alec's. When Alec groans, long and loud, Magnus laughs like the marvelous, awful person that he is, and does it again.

Alec braces one hand on his neck, the other on his hip, and makes him do it slower, again, again, in lingering glides, drinking in the play of the sensation across Magnus's face. His eyes squeeze shut and flicker open. His mouth forms a word that hangs unspoken as his legs clench around Alec's hips. Alec can't look anywhere but at him, the gorgeous layering of his pleasure, and Magnus lets him look.

They pant and grasp and grind their way up a stuttering climb. Alec feels everything in him go hot and tense with the oncoming orgasm, when Magnus twists away, breaking the swell of it just before the peak. With a bereft whine that'd embarrass him in any other moment, Alec fumbles for him.

Magnus bends down to claim a kiss, keeping their bodies apart with a forearm laid across Alec's chest. "You want to go deeper," he mumbles, "so let's not rush this."

Alec processes that for several hazy beats as the tension ebbs. Okay, Magnus has a point. A stunning, ruinous point.

"Right. Where do you want me?"

Magnus nudges Alec over onto his side. "Here is good. Make use of that reach and find the lube, if you would. We may want it at hand."

"Is that a promise?" Alec tries to kiss him and fumble at the nightstand drawer at the same time, fouls up both, and leaves Magnus rolling his eyes fondly as he retrieves the bottle.

"It's a possibility."

Alec huffs in his throat. "Just come here."

So they let their hands roam, over hips and backs and spines. Alec arches at the gentle and unsubtle press of Magnus's fingertips into the juncture of his leg and ass, then in between his buttocks. Wrapping a knee over Magnus's hip, he muffles a shuddering noise into Magnus's hair, tensing under the crooking strokes, as lazy and slow as they are, then kisses Magnus again, wet and deep and clumsy. There's no rhythm to it except the thread of pleas and gasps spun out between them.

Magnus brings Alec to a second teetering height with a slick finger in his ass and sucking bites on his nipple, and then pulls him back just as surely and tenderly. Alec moans and squirms and thumps his head against a pillow. After a few rough breaths, stars still in the corners of his vision, he grapples Magnus into the bed, and despite the lust muddling his coordination, Magnus goes down onto his back with a rasping laugh.

The lack of grace is becoming a mutual problem. Their next kiss dissolves into quick, hungry presses of contact, smeared over their mouths. Forcing himself to slow, Alec kisses the corner of Magnus's mouth, moves across each lip with a gentle tug of teeth, feels Magnus wind a hand in his hair.

Then Alec cups Magnus's balls against his palm and teases them with his thumb, until Magnus's breath churns itself into harsh, needy gasps. Magnus pushes at his head with shaking fingers.

"Alexander. Please, I need your mouth, right there, please—"

Shuddering with his own want, Alec gives it to him. Not without a few lingering detours down Magnus's body first, just to feel the pleasure jolt in his muscles, the aborted jerks of his hips. He licks at Magnus's cock, then circles the head with soft, out-turned lips.

" _Fuck_ ," Magnus says, thick and hoarse, and Alec tastes bitter drops of precome on his tongue. "Oh, darling."

That _darling_ has nothing to do with the blithe, off-the-cuff one Magnus tossed his way in the kitchen. It makes Alec want to crawl back up and kiss it from Magnus's burning mouth.

Half to distract himself and his aching heart, he sucks Magnus down, slick and shallow, pinning his hip down with a wide-set hand. Short, heady pulls, enough to stoke the sensation from a bright ember to a rushing flame. Magnus spouts a series of breathless curses, probably veering from living languages to a couple of dead ones, but doesn't fight Alec's grip. His toes scratch at the sheet, his knees splaying and rising again.

Alec hears in his breaths how close he is.

He drags his tongue up Magnus's shaft, taut and wet, and a shout dries in Magnus's throat, coming out as rapid little ripples of air.

"I can't, Alec, fuck, you feel so—"

"You can, babe." Alec doesn't have much voice left, himself, but at least the rough-edged ruin of it has been proven to work for Magnus. "For me."

"Well," Magnus says, with a valiant trace of humor and breathtaking fondness, "for you, always."

Alec finds himself muffling a choked sound into Magnus's stomach. Then he slides up to face Magnus, and says, in a near whisper, "I just wanna see you."

Magnus nods, licks his parched lips, and gathers Alec into his lap, kisses his heaving ribs and strokes his back. One arm around Magnus's shoulders, hand flat to his back, Alec presses into him, the yearning for skin greater than the urgency for this one moment.

Despite that, they've teased and twisted each other into such knots of barely bridled need that they won't hold much longer. Alec hitches his hips up, nudges Magnus's cock until it catches on his rim and slides in, a mere sweet, tantalizing inch.

"Oh," Magnus says. "I want. If you do. I want you so much."

"And _can_ you?" Alec can't resists asking, though it earns him a bruising bite on his neck, soothed then by Magnus's lips dwelling there.

Magnus grips Alec's ass, tugging him closer, and smiles, wicked and tender. "Have a little faith."

This is not the moment to remember that some days, that's all Alec has.

They take that last long, smooth rise together, between tarrying kisses and guiding hands, Alec spread open and squirming in Magnus's lap, Magnus cradling his head and holding his mouth until their breaths come too harsh for kissing.

Alec watches Magnus meet his pleasure with his eyes waywardly open, pupils wide and inky. The orgasm, coaxed and chased through a repeated ebb and flow, surges through them both almost at once. Magnus moans, Alec's name crumpling in his mouth; that pulls Alec over the brink just as surely as Magnus sinking deep into him, their bodies molding and sliding together.

With a shaky sigh, Alec surrenders.

His heart and breath calm gradually, Magnus's arms still bracing him. He traces lazy hands over Magnus's chest as if to scoop in his palms the humming, mellow feeling that encircles them.

It feels like a tiny tragedy to separate. Magnus keeps stroking Alec's cheek, in slow lines across his heated skin. Finally Alec takes his hand between his own and shifts just to the side, leaning into the tousled pillows. Surprise tugs at Magnus's inhalation, but then he follows, curling onto his side inside the looser curve of Alec's body.

They let the silence hold them for a moment more.

"You understand," Magnus says, "that I can't tell you everything yet."

Alec knows his smile is wry. "You can take your time. I'm in this for good."

He's tried to say that over and over, a stubborn and futile refrain in the messy patterns of Magnus's coping with the impossible question of his mortality. This time, Magnus seems to actually pause over it. His gaze dips to their linked hands and back to Alec again.

"Even if I take the next fifty years to do it?"

"Even then," Alec says.

He doesn't have any definite solutions. Neither of them does. When Magnus leans his brow to Alec's, sighing like that is his first truly easy breath in days, it still feels like an answer.

 


End file.
